Overclocking, RAID and System Setup

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

The overclocking options on the Thunder K7X are nill – nothing – not a chance at overclocking this unless you modify the processors themselves. And Tyan wants it this way. The stability of the motherboards is far more important to them, especially for the market they are aiming at with this platform, than allowing the end-user to modify their settings. Giving them that option takes away any chances of the board’s stability being misrepresented or skewed.

The RAID options on the IDE side of things are also: none. Tyan figures that if someone is purchasing this serious of a motherboard, they are going to want to be using a serious storage solution: and that include SCSI and SCSI RAID, not IDE RAID.

The system setup was chosen on the three dual-Athlon motherboards to allow for the best comparison between them. The benchmarks that were run were mainly focuses on the productivity and business tests, and the amount of gaming tests were cut back significantly here. We all know that for gaming, it makes more sense to have a single-processor system running on a KT333 chipset motherboard, anyway. 🙂

Test System Setup
CPU 2 x 1.67 GHz AMD Athlon MP 2000+ Processors
Motherboards Tyan Thunder K7X
MSI K7D Master-L
Tyan Tiger MPX
Memory 1 x 512MB Crucial PC2100 DDR DRAM
Hard Drive 20.5GB 7200 RPM IBM EIDE
Video Card GeForce 3
Video Drivers Detonator 22.40
Operating System Windows XP

Tests:

Quake III: Arena
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bench
SiSoft Sandra CPU Bench
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2002
Business Winstone 2001
4 different SPEC view perf tests
Cachemem
ScienceMark
Sysmark 2001
CliBench III
Linux Compilation
Adobe Photoshop

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